In the designing and manufacturing of storage product, some verification steps are generally used to monitor the expander and end devices. Disk drives from different vendors may meet some standards and, realize the required performance so as to guarantee quality of disk drives from different vendors. Though real disk drives from different vendors can be used directly for verification, some negative tests (e.g. tests under extreme conditions) will damage the real disk drives.
To avoid damage to real disk drives, some disk drive simulators arise to simulate functions of the disk drive, such as an input/output (I/O) performance simulator. However, the simulation mode of the traditional disk drive simulator is fixed and cannot be configured according to different test requirement or applied to other platforms. Therefore, the traditional simulators can only simulate few functions, for example, only I/O performance or the power characteristic of the disk drive. Moreover, the traditional disk simulators do not have a standard interface for controlling the simulator.